Lighten Up! The World Needs Illumination. And Light. And Love.

Life is a lot more interesting if you are interested in the people and the places around you. So, illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do.”              --Alan Moore, author “V for Vendetta” et al

Lighten up.

That was the wise advice my spiritual director gave me on one of my more downhearted, deadly serious, “chicken little the sky is falling” kind of days.  Can’t remember what I was worrying about, or griping about; what person I was anxious to please or what part of my work I was kvetching about. What in this world, with all its brokenness and beauty, I was complaining about.

The point is—I was living without light. Living unilluminated. Being shady in a way, shadow filled. Pigpen from Charlie Brown comics walks around with perpetual dirt clouds surrounding him.  If I am not careful, I can walk around with perpetual dark clouds surrounding me, huge gray puffy clouds threatening to rain on my parade, on your parade too, if I am not careful.

Thus, my need for light and illumination and to just lighten up. And to remember this sage wisdom every day.  I need the light. We all need the light just to see better, to see more, to see clearly now that the rain is gone, and it just might be a bright sunny day, in the words of a beautiful song.

Thank goodness this week contains the exact day when our supply of natural light is at its peak for the year. On our summer solstice, the sun came up at 5:10 am and didn’t go back down until 8:26 pm.  So much sunlight for so long, longer than any other day of the year. Yes, on June 21^st we will start “losing” sunlight in these parts of the world but let’s not talk about that yet, ok?

Let’s talk about summer light.

The light that allows us to watch a Little League baseball game on a balmy June evening, cheering for all those young players as they round the bases so earnestly. Summer light allows us to enjoy an after-dinner ice cream cone at Dairy Queen or some other local creamery. To stand in line with our fellow frozen treat aficionados as the sun hangs around and nothing tastes better than a cone on a still bright night, right? Summer light gifts us with a long bike ride after work, or nine holes post the office, or maybe a quick sail, or just a walk with the dog.

We need that light. Need to be the light too. God’s light. A love light.

Lately I’ve been paying attention to the people in my life and world who bring light into the lives of other people for no other reason that to just do good and be God’s good in a world that always threatens to go all dim.  Like the person in the drive-thru line at DD’s who paid for the coffee of the person behind them. It’s true. It happened. Someone actually did that for me once. That lightened me up! Or how about folks who treat a brow beaten clerk behind the counter with kindness and care, saying a sincere and kind “Thank you!” and maybe even leaving an unexpectedly generous tip.

That’s sure to brighten someone’s day.

Or think of the rare politician, the civic leader who brings out the light and the goodness in the people she serves. That’s what great leaders always do: they bring out the light in others.  Bad leaders always evoke the worst, appeal to the darkest of human impulses, and are only interested in light if it shines on them. What an illuminated world it could be if folks threw out all those shadowy leaders and instead lifted up those who embody light.

Light. Love. Peace. Joy. Hope.

Funny thing about light is that the more you share with others, the lighter our own lives become.  We lighten up and laugh and don’t take ourselves too seriously and it gives permission for other folks to lighten up too. Jesus was right when he said to his students, “You are the light of the world!”

We all have the light within. The question is….do we see it? See and give thanks to the creator of all illumination for our own light, then share it with others? Everybody needs the light.  Needs illumination. Needs to remember that each human life matters, that if one light, just one life is threatened, all the lights are threatened.

Lighten up.

I’m trying. And you? Will you be the light today? 

Happy summer solstice!

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

 

      

D-Day Eighty Years Later: Could We Make Such a Sacrifice?

The American citizen soldiers…didn’t want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So, they fought, and won, and all of us, living and yet to be born, must be profoundly grateful.” --Stephen Ambrose, "D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of WWII"

“I see the bodies, John, when I fall asleep and dream. It makes me afraid to close my eyes.”

That’s what Jack told me when I visited him in the hospital several years ago, after he suffered a fall. He was in his late eighties then, with wisps of white hair atop his head, and sharp and clear blue eyes, which looked at me so intently, as I took his hand and listened.

“I was the pilot of a landing craft on D-Day,” he said. “Omaha Beach. I was in charge of a boat that brought troops from the ships to the shores of the beach.”

June 6, 1944: eighty years ago, this week. D-Day was the spearhead of Operation Overlord, the largest amphibious assault ever assembled. Men like Jack piloted 5,000 LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank) to drop 132,000 American, British, and Canadian troops on beaches along the French coast, in Normandy.  Allied planes flew 14,000 sorties to support the landings and 7,000 naval vessels waited offshore. That day the goal was clear and simple: to take back Europe from Hitler and fascism, and to rescue millions of people held under the rule of a murderous despot.

Yet even with the unfathomably huge scale of the battle, that day and that war, as always, was finally personal, up close, unforgettable to those who fought.  People like Jack who in his late teens signed up for the Navy right after Pearl Harbor in 1941. Like so many people then, Jack just knew it was his duty as a citizen to do his part and to help win the war.

On the second day of the invasion after the beach had been largely secured, Jack was still bringing troops and supplies ashore. As he steered his ship through the waters, hundreds of bodies floated on the surface all around his vessel, bobbing up and down, banging against the sides of landing craft. They were soldiers who had been killed in the first wave of landings.

Jack could not escape this awful memory. He told me he had not thought about it for many years, until his nights in the hospital, when, for some reason, it all came back to him. The dead. His feeling of helplessness, that he could not bring any of them back to life. Survivor’s guilt that he was still alive while they were gone forever.

I’m remembering Jack this week, as our world marks the 80^th anniversary of D-Day. It symbolizes and sums up in a way, the personal and collective sacrifice of millions of Americans, who overseas and at home, sacrificed time, and comfort, and loved ones and limbs and lives, for a cause so much greater than self alone.

Of course, there are no morally “clean” wars or wartimes. Millions of innocents died on both sides. In 1944 racism was the norm in our country, so Blacks served in segregated outfits and were denied certain roles in the military. Japanese Americans were held in detention camps, even though they had lived here for generations. Women worked in the factories until wars’ end when most were summarily laid off to make room for returning men.   

Yet for all the ways America struggled to live up to its professed ideals, even still, it is amazing to consider just what so many in Jack’s generation did. Gave up. Fought for. Lost in that war. The haunting memories that would not go away, even after so many decades. 

I’ve come to know many veterans like Jack. Ken, who scaled the bluffs on Normandy beach. Ann, who served as a nurse in the WAVES, the women’s reserve force of the Navy.  Murray, who met his wife Jessie, in London, when he was just 19; he survived Normandy as an infantry man. I’ve never heard any of them say that they regretted what they did, the service they offered to a nation and world in need.

We are living in strange times, eight decades later, with such weird and troubling contrasts between then and now. An ex-president again vying for the highest office in the land has unashamedly called soldiers and prisoners of war, “losers” and “suckers.” We lack any collective understanding about the necessity for communal sacrifice. It makes me wonder…could we do what Jack did? Do we have that civic strength?

I’d like to believe that we still do, that Jack’s example of serving a greater good, and the common good…it still is in our American DNA. I have to believe that, as a citizen and a neighbor, someone who still loves this place we call home, even for all its sins and excesses and mistakes.  

So, thank you, Jack, for your service. We must never forget it. May God help us all, to do our part, if and when the call goes out.  

To serve. To give. To sacrifice.        

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.